The recent flap over National Public Radio’s Web site, NPR.org, offering book consumers an exclusive link to Amazon.com has once again spurred questions about the importance of an online presence for independent booksellers.
Booksellers were up in arms (see PW Daily, June 28) over the link, generating discussion about the kind of online presence they need and whether it’s even worth trying to compete online against dot-com leviathans like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
This new spotlight on bookstore Web sites couldn’t have come at a better time for wholesaler Baker & Taylor, which announced at BEA that it is creating TheRetailerPlace.com, an alternative to the ABA’s e-commerce turnkey solution, BookSense.com, and to BookSite, which is used by a number of larger stores, including Harvard Book Store and Politics & Prose. Both BookSense.com and BookSite link their search engines to the Ingram database.
According to William Preston, senior v-p of Baker & Taylor Retail and International, the company’s sales reps are already selling TheRetailerPlace.com, which will be rolled out later this month or early next. Patterned after the e-commerce solution offered by the company’s J.A. Majors division for college stores, TheRetailerPlace.com is currently being beta-tested. Unlike most of the other programs available, Baker & Taylor’s was developed specifically for booksellers who already have an online presence and is designed to accommodate a variety of stores. Preston described the site as “a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Bookseller Kim Binster, owner of Oscar Wilde Book Shop in New York City, is looking forward to the Baker & Taylor option. “We’ve already got a decent Web site,” she said of www.oscarwildebooks.com. “We just need a decent search engine and shopping cart.” With TheRetailerPlace.com, her customers will be able to click on the search button and link seamlessly to Baker & Taylor’s Web site. They will still see her store name and logo. Any books, music and DVDs ordered will be shipped directly to customers from one of Baker & Taylor’s warehouses in a box with a label and invoice marked with Oscar Wilde’s name, address and logo.
Both BookSite and TheRetailerPlace.com declined to provide figures on total number of users, but with 225 active users, BookSense.com is currently the e-commerce solution of choice for the ABA’s nearly 1,600 bookstore members. Over the past year, BookSense.com, which enables booksellers to develop Web sites by customizing templates, has added digital e-book downloads and browsable pages highlighting titles from Random House and HarperCollins. Other features likely to be added in the near future include digital audio downloads and podcasts. In an open letter to NPR late last month, ABA president Russ Lawrence, owner of Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton, Mont., noted, “We are constantly re-evaluating the efficacy of all ABA programs and services, including the BookSense.com hub site. In fact, the association is in the midst of an audit of the entire Book Sense marketing program, including the BookSense.com hub site.”
Even with the proposed changes, some booksellers are not convinced that the BookSense.com approach, with a comprehensive Web site, à la Amazon.com—but where customers have to enter their ZIP codes in order to search—is the best solution. “The whole thing is based on a third chain, and it doesn’t work,” said David Didriksen, founder and president of Willow Books & Café in Acton, Mass., whose online sales are mostly to his regular customers. They order online and pick up in-store. “That’s all it is; that’s all it ever will be,” Didriksen added. “If people are really determined to buy a book online, they’re going to buy it from Amazon.com. We’re not going to beat a billion-dollar company. But we don’t need to. We have a physical presence, and they do not. Online booksellers cannot beat us in our individual markets unless we let them.”
“What the Internet is about now is community,” said BookSite founder Dick Harte. “Every bookstore can be a community leader. We make it possible, and easier, by having an open platform and having a broad array of resources that are all together.” Harte recently hired a 16-year-old consultant to help him better understand how to make the company even more responsive. Harte continues to upgrade BookSite’s functionality, although booksellers have yet to take advantage of some offerings, like movie trailers, which were introduced two years ago.
One new entrant, Moonshadow eCommerce, which uses the Baker & Taylor database, loosely resembles BookSite, but without its many bells and whistles. Cofounded by former music store owner Bob Lee in 1999, when the music business went south, Moonshadow began by providing e-commerce solutions for music retailers like Newbury Comics in Massachusetts and added independent booksellers through its BookstoreHost.com division four years later. “I don’t think there’s one single e-commerce solution,” said Lee, whose product enables booksellers to sell both new and used books online. “We think we’ve built a very nice, very robust solution to meet the idiosyncratic needs of book retailers.”
Internet start-up children’s bookseller Charles Bayless, who launched Through the Magic Door (www.ttmd.com) in mid-June, has been pleased with Moonshadow’s ability to provide programming and build an online community for his customers. “This was the experience I hoped for,” said Bayless.
Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., is one of the few stores that has built a site (Powells.com), including search engines, from the ground up. In the process, one of the country’s largest independents may have succeeded in creating a viable alternative to the big two online booksellers. “We’re much smaller, but we offer comparable selection and service. Thanks to limited but strategic discounting and our broad inventory of used books, we can compete on price, too,” said Dave Weich, director of marketing and development. Although he did not give sales figures, Weich noted that “we’re third in terms of visibility. The site handles between 80,000 and 90,000 visitors a day.” And while Powell’s sells a lot of books through its in-store pickup program, introduced last summer, as much as 85% of its sales comes from outside the Pacific Northwest. Last March, Powells.com began buying used books online. Of course, Powells.com has a lot more staff—about 65 booksellers—working on its Web site than most book retailers can afford.
But despite the Powell’s example and other e-tailing options available for booksellers, BookSite’s Harte contends that most bricks-and-mortar stores should consider skipping online selling. “For three-quarters of the bookstores out there,” he said, “the best thing they can do is not use any of us. They should use Constant Contact [an e-mail marketing newsletter] along with a Web page that tells people their telephone number, address and how to find them. If a bookstore doesn’t know why in the world they are on the Internet, they shouldn’t be on it.”
